Art Beat: Burgeoning technology rocks a painter's world

Thursday

May 1, 2014 at 12:01 AM

"From today, painting is dead."

Don Wilkinson

"From today, painting is dead."

Don't panic, anyone. French painter Paul Delaroche purportedly uttered that line in 1839, shortly after seeing examples of the daguerreotype, the first type of photography to come into widespread usage. He was wrong, of course. Paul Cezanne was born that very same year and he went on to revolutionize the way the world thinks of painting. And then came van Gogh, Matisse, Picasso, Braque, O'Keeffe, deKooning, Pollock, Rauschenberg, Warhol, and on and on.

But I understand Delaroche's trepidation and angst. I have recently had a similar thought, borne of an unexpected source. My wife Elizabeth, a fabric artist, has begun using her phone to take photographs. (Think about the incongruousness of the last part of that sentence: —¦ using her phone to take photographs." Had someone said that 20 years ago, you might think them daft.)

Specifically, she photographed the head of an old doll in a local antique shop and posted it on Facebook. She had manipulated the image on her phone in such a manner that it was not clear that it was even a photograph. Luis Villanueva, owner of the Colo Colo Gallery, sent her a message asking her to explain her method. And so began my existentialist dilemma.

I look at what advanced technological devices and programs (the digital camera, Photoshop, the iPad, high-end ink jet printers) have brought to the eyes and hands of visual artists, especially painters — in the most traditional sense of the word — and my world has been rocked. Most think of painting as being easel-based, with pigments suspended in oil, acrylic, or water. The brush is the usual tool of application, but other options include fingers, sponges, palette knives, squeegee, airbrush and aerosol cans. Subject matter aside, painting as a medium as been in a rapid rate of evolution since the era of Cubism, when Picasso and Braque began gluing on strips of newspaper. Painting has continued to morph, never more quickly than in this digital moment.

What does it mean to a painter in this new age? Will painters cling onto brush, tube paints and easel out of a sense of tradition and romance? Will it be anything other than a nostalgic devotion to a dwindling art form, much like weaving on a loom, taking Polaroid photographs, doing woodcuts; anything other than a slavish embrace of a form of craft that becomes increasingly less relevant? These are heady and disturbing thoughts to one who has been a longtime painter and printmaker. And I have no answers.

I sought the opinion of my friend Ben Martinez, a vibrant and skilled "old-school" painter and former art educator who has recently begun "playing with" making images on his iPad using an app called Paper 53. I was familiar with a series of pictures he had created on the device and shared on social media. They depict an ongoing narrative that focuses on the life of the young Pablo Picasso. They are rather handsome and remarkably fluid, and to my eye, as loaded with meaning and a keen artist's sensibility as any of his paintings or drawings.

Martinez, for his part, was a bit more ambiguous. He described the app as "an expensive notebook." But he did note that he was "not interested in craft. Cezanne put down a splotch, and then another splotch, and then another. Pollock made it even simpler "¦" He went on to say, and I paraphrase, "that if that if art is well-imagined and well-felt — if thinking and feeling are congruent — the painting will be good enough." He described his iPad sketches as "thought given physicality." But where? There is no thing. They exist in the ether.

I personally have many questions — about the art marketplace, about dematerialization, the visual commons — brought upon by this technology. And I embrace the future albeit with a few butterflies in my belly.

Don Wilkinson is a painter and art critic who lives in New Bedford. Contact him at Don.Wilkinson@gmail.com